Feature by Sharon Secor

People talk. There's no getting around it. People talk about each other and about themselves because we are social animals who love to communicate. This month we look at talk from three different points of view: talk as a marketing tool, as a sales technique and as an organizational development device. Talk is at the heart of The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Advertising by...

Steve Jobs 2.0

It's steamy and suggestive, an unauthorized tell-all. These are words business reviewers rarely get to use. Banned is another word rarely applied to business books, yet iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business has managed to acquire all of the above descriptors. Written by Jeffrey S. Young, co-founder of MacWorld and Forbes.com, and William L. Simon, a screenwriter,...

Big advice for the small investor

If your plan is to dive deeper into real estate, you should pick up The ABCs of Real Estate Investing before you take the plunge. Author Ken McElroy is CEO of his own real estate firm and has 20 years of real estate experience. He has 4,300 units under construction and management and he has directly overseen management of over 20,000 units in eight states. He's not a high-flying Donald Trump;...

Big advice for the small investor

Ready for more? Pick up Trump Strategies for Real Estate: Billionaire Lessons for the Small Investor. Written by George H. Ross, best known as one of Donald Trump's sidekicks on The Apprentice, this book will help you move into the bigger leagues of real estate investing. Ross gives some tips that seem to come right from the popular television show Be Distinctive: Add Sizzle to Your Property...

A woman's home is her castle

<b>A woman's home is her castle</b> Vanessa Summers' <b>Buying Solo: The Single Woman's Guide to Buying a First Home</b> is perfect for women agonizing over the right time to buy. This purse-sized volume encourages women to get into the market, taking charge of their houses and lives instead of waiting for Mr. Right to build the castle. Summers, the author of another...

Financing the dream home

Deciding to buy is just part of the process figuring out how to pay for property is the next step. That's where David Reed's Mortgages 101: Quick Answers to Over 250 Critical Questions About Your Home Loan comes in. It is an indispensable guide to answer any question imaginable when you're buying a home or other property. If you own your own business, have had credit trouble or just want to...

Taking flight with the little airline that could

Travel writer and aviation editor Barbara S. Peterson first interviewed jetBlue founder David Neeleman in 1999 while researching an article on new airlines. Neeleman was full of great ideas and lots of promises. He had $10 million in freshly raised funds in the bank, but no airplanes, no staff and no pilots. His airline flew on paper only. Peterson revisits jetBlue in Blue Streak: Inside...

Think like a winner

Jack Canfield's The Success Principles is a wide-ranging self-help book. Although it was conceived with the average middle manager in mind, a stay-at-home mom or a retired 60-something could also glean some wise advice here. Canfield is best known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and if you never picked up one of those, shall we say, more lightweight books, you will be pleasantly...

Practical Tactics

You've worked like dog for the last three months. You've put in late hours, skipped weekends and added extra business trips to your schedule. You've taken a dying division and added snap, crackle and pop to its bottom line. But when it came to bonus time, you were overlooked and your division under-rated. What's that all about? Rick Brandon and Marty Seldman, co-authors of Survival of the...

Practical tactics

How many times have you wondered, If I died tomorrow, would anyone in this office even notice that I'm gone? Some of us seem like mild-mannered Clark Kent at the office when we'd rather be known as the man of steel, Superman. Alan Axelrod's Office Superman: Make Yourself Indispensable in the Workplace offers a whole lot of practical advice for career-minded Clark Kents whose core of steel is...